BRITISH AGENT
by R. H. Bruce Lockhart
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
HUGH WALPOLE
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
1933
NEW YORK AND LONDON
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by
HUGH WALPOLE
I HAVE been expecting this book for a long time, and with very eager curiosity. So prejudiced did I feel, not of necessity in its favour but at least in its importance, that I waited, without a word, for the opinions of other critics, who had not, as I had, been in Russia with Lockhart. They could not be conscious, as I was, of his strangely contradictory and---to myself---singularly attractive personality. I could be no fair judge of this book.
Myself, at my first reading of it, I was so aware of the sound of Lockhart's voice---an odd voice, assertive and modest, arrogant and humorously depreciatory all at the same time---that I could not judge it at all as literature. It seemed to me scarcely to be written, to be too journalistic, and to be of a quite thrilling interest. But all this was personal prejudice.
Then I discovered that the book had a remarkable effect on those who knew nothing of Lockhart and cared less. It had two great qualities, they said---honesty and vivid actuality. And it had a third---the direct revelation of the personality of a most unusual character. These things I believe to be strictly true. And, in addition, the book deals, in the main, with one of the really terrific crises in the world's history. Or, rather, with a series of them. Again and again, as one reads Lockhart's book, one feels that had a chair been moved, a voice coughed, a man looked in a mirror the whole future of the world would have changed its shape. But perhaps not. I myself find it very difficult to look back now on the sequence of events after August 4th, 1914, and not believe in an undercurrent of destiny---and the end is certainly not yet. The second half of Lockhart's book is surely one of the most thrilling things in all the war records. You feel that he exaggerates nothing, sentimentalizes over nothing, is not shocked, nor disgusted, nor frightened, nor exultant. A singularly passive young man, for it is as a very young man indeed that I still think of him, because, when I first knew him as Vice-Consul of Moscow, he looked like a first-term undergraduate who might get his place in the Freshman's trials at Rugby football.
His swift, unexcited pen-pictures of all the figures that crowded that odd stage are surely very remarkable. Peters, for instance, by now a quite legendary figure, or Lenin advancing to the front of a platform at a revolutionary meeting, the Englishmen, Buchanan, Cromie, Knox, Hicks, and the others. And his own personal courage and common sense is everywhere present, reminding me here of the humorous insouciance of Yeats-Brown in Bengal Lancer and Golden Horn.
But the great and final quality of this record is its honesty. Here, in this book, there are many of the most hotly-debated events in history. I suppose that there is no European alive today who, in an official position, was able at first hand to watch so long a sequence of the Russian crises as Lockhart. And it is fortunate for us that he is, by nature, so honest a man. You can test it, if you like, by his extreme honesty about himself. He conceals nothing; he is not concerned to conceal anything. He is really burning with a passion for the truth, and he sinks all personal prejudice in his love for it. When you consider, for instance, the things that he must have suffered under the hands of the Bolshevik, Peters---notice how Peters showed him the horror of the Russian priest going out to be shot---the fairness of his portrait of that man is quite extraordinary. Especially I would like to draw the attention of readers to his words on page 188 about our Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, "that splendid old man," as he calls him. And he was a splendid old man, afterwards traduced, now at last beginning to be vindicated.
This is a fine graphic contribution to history---one of the most honest and vivid that we have had.
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| MALAYAN NOVITIATE | |
| Chapter One | |
| Chapter Two | |
| Chapter Three | |
| Chapter Four | |
| Chapter Five | |
| Chapter Six | |
| Chapter Seven | |
| THE MOSCOW PAGEANT | |
| Chapter One | |
| Chapter Two | |
| Chapter Three | |
| Chapter Four | |
| WAR AND PEACE | |
| Chapter One | |
| Chapter Two | |
| Chapter Three | |
| Chapter Four | |
| Chapter Five | |
| Chapter Six | |
| Chapter Seven | |
| Chapter Eight | |
| Chapter Nine | |
| "HISTORY FROM THE INSIDE" | |
| Chapter One | |
| Chapter Two | |
| Chapter Three | |
| Chapter Four | |
| Chapter Five | |
| Chapter Six | |
| Chapter Seven | |
| Chapter Eight | |
| Chapter Nine | |
| Chapter Ten |
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ILLUSTRATIONS
| PASS SIGNED BY TROTSKY | |
| STATEMENT SIGNED BY LENIN | |
| BOLSHEVIK NEWS-SHEET, PRINTED IN ENGLISH |
.
"I am not sure that what I feel is remorse.
I have seen the ocean when, lashed by
something in itself or out of itself, wrecked
and ruined, and I have seen the ocean
when it carried my barque in safety. It
was the same ocean, and what is the
use of words."
.
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